Doug Jeck – (1963 - )
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DOUG JECK – (1963 - ) Seattle artist Doug Jeck works in a variety of media – ceramics, painting, performance art, mixed media – but he is probably best known for his figurative work, what he refers to as “human objects.” The figures are painstakingly hand built from the ground up, meticulously crafted and finished with paints and other materials. They draw from the tradition of heroic sculpture but these individuals are not heroic in the usual sense. Instead they represent the anti-hero, the everyman, who has been buffeted by life, damaged and yet somehow still survives. The inner damage is reflected in the damage done to the figure itself by the artist: body parts are missing or hacked off and put back in a different places, and the carriage of the body itself reflects defeat and insecurity. In addition to his studio work, Jeck is on the faculty of the University of Washington where he is an Associate Professor in the Ceramics Arts Department. ARTIST’S STATEMENT – DOUG JECK “I‟ve looked hard at the history of the human object. I wonder the same thing about it as I do about myself: Is what has been more blessed than what will be? This question is at the core of everything I make and, perhaps, the reason why clay is most appropriate. „Human Object.‟ I prefer this term to define my work instead of „figurative sculpture.‟ This is not merely a semantic distinction. „Figurative‟ implies the removal of that which is directly human into a symbolic representation. „Human Object‟ not only describes the uncanny presence of the thing I make, but also refers to the focus of its content. My work takes a long time to make. I build a hollow human body by adding thin strips of clay on top of each other an inch at a time. I start on the ground, with the feet, and work up, slowly defining the body, hour by hour, day after day. Each time I work on this body, which will eventually have a face, pupils, and an implied persona, I have a different, unique combination of encounters with the human object influencing me – a previous student critique, a BBC radio broadcast, the Brahms 3rd Piano Concerto, the recollection of a stranger‟s gait, my latest, seemingly brilliant epiphany on Art, my sons‟ latest perplexing questions, etc. Throughout this process and in the finished work, I am as certain that the implied persona that has emerged through months of this attention has been defined by it, as I am that it will eventually become a fragmented piece of insignificant, dusty junk. Or maybe not.”1 1. Doug Jeck. “Artist Info.” http://www.virginiaagrootfooundation.org/grantrecipients.html RESUME – DOUG JECK 1963 Born, Jersey City, NJ 1986 Appalachian Center for the Arts and Crafts, Smithville, TN, B.F.A. 1989 School of the Art Institute of Chicago, M.F.A. 1990 Illinois Arts Council Grant National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship 1992 LaNapoule Foundation/NEA Travel Grant, LaNapoule, France National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artists Fellowship 1994-1996 Assistant Professor, New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, Alfred, NY 1996-present Associate Professor, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 1997 Virginia A. Groot Foundation, 3rd Place Award 1998 Virginia A. Groot Foundation, 2nd Place Award 2000 Virginia A. Groot Foundation, 2nd Place Award 2001 Neddy Foundation Artist Fellowship, Seattle, WA Georgette Koopman Endowed Chair in the Visual Arts, University of Hartford, Hartford, CT 2008 Neddy Artist Fellowship Nominee BIOGRAPHY – DOUG JECK Doug Jeck was raised in South Florida; his family, he has said, was poor, did not own a car and lived in the projects in a rundown section of town. His mother deserted the family when Jeck and his brother were young and was not heard from again. Jeck and his brother grew up with their father and later a step-mother, and the legacies of the experience of poverty and of missing life pieces appear as themes in Jeck‟s art. He did his undergraduate studies at the Appalachian Center for the Arts and Crafts and received his M.F.A. from the Art Institute of Chicago. His background, he has stated, was in music, and in a sense he fell into his way of working because he did not have the standard approach to art instruction. He studied clay, metal, glass, wood and other media, but although the figure would become his signature work, had no formal training in drawing or figure modeling, instead reading and working through the studies of the human body on his own. Doug Jeck‟s early work was intuitively based; during graduate school he made the decision to move toward a more realistic style, working deliberately and thoughtfully. While he has worked in mixed media, painting and performance art, Jeck is best known for his fragmented male figures, figures which refer back to classical sculpture and begin as ideal forms. Then comes the destruction. Body parts are removed or first removed and put back in a different place. Some figures are on pedestals, again a reference to classical sculpture, but in Jeck‟s sculptures, the pedestal becomes part of the figure, not a platform. The result is not the hero of classical work, but the anti-hero, the ordinary man. The figures reflect uncertainty, not sureness; a sense of defeat rather than triumph; damage, not perfection; an individual who has been battered by time and life. Ultimately, however, Jeck sees in his damaged figures the true ideal; individuals do struggle and they do get beaten up by life, but they prevail and find meaning, and in prevailing there is beauty, there is heroism, and there is the meaning of what it is to be human. Jeck‟s figures are not reflections of particular people but reflections of a psychology. In that sense, Jeck has said, they are self-portraits – not literally, but emotionally because it is his personal psychology, of course, that is most readily available to him. The figures are “human objects,” he has said, because they describe the human objective as well as represent it. The fragmentation draws on his own feelings of loss and damage growing up and his grappling with what it means to be male. Many critics have used the word “ambiguity” in describing his work, and Jeck agrees. He has described his work as moving backwards in time to understand the character of the artist. The working process is a very deliberate one. No sketches are made prior to starting although he has a general sense of the pose he is going to make. Classical sculpture featured a system of proportion for the ideal figure, but Jeck‟s everyman does not follow those proportions. Clay is the chosen material for several reasons. First, it is a traditional medium in ancient sculpture and marble is a difficult, time consuming material. Second marble is also associated, in his mind with the traditional definition of hero, that is superior individuals like gods or popes; clay, on the other hand is a very basic material, and in choosing the humble material to unsuccessfully mimic marble, he is reinforcing the idea that his figures are both nobody and everybody. And third, clay, unlike marble or stone, allows the artist to change his mind, to make decisions along the way and alter the result. No molds are used in making the figures; instead, he relies totally on hand building and coil building. It is a slow process which allows periods of time to contemplate the figure as it is being built. The sculptures are thus hollow, and as the figure emerges, the artist is working inside and out simultaneously, a process Jeck sees as symbolic of the inside pressure of the psyche and the outside pressure of the world; in short, how man himself is constructed. As the figure evolves, the emotional content evolves as well, the emotion expressed in the body or in some aspect of the body rather than in the facial expression. The figures are finished with porcelain and a thin wash of acrylic paint. Often bits of hair or other materials are incorporated as well, some of which may burn out in the firing but enhance the act of the creation. When the clay is nearly dry, details are added by carving with dental tools and dull pencils. A great deal of attention is paid to these details, allowing Jeck‟s own emotions and feelings to be released through the art. Jeck does not glaze his work but instead uses paint after they are fired. The fragmentation which occurs after the piece is finished is what Jeck has called “cheating time.” In classical sculpture the piece is damaged over time by nature or other means; the damage to Jeck‟s figures is deliberate, done by the artist himself, rather than waiting for time. In that sense, Jeck has said, he owns something that is timeless. The entire process is not about the production of a piece of sculpture but a working out of his interest in history, in shrinking time, in accelerating fragmentation. He sees his work as projects not objects. More recently Jeck has approached the figure in different ways. He made a series of figurines, small pieces that he sees as reflective of culture rather than removed from it. A figurine is also, by virtue of its size, something that can be possessed, held, and thus the relationship between the artist or viewer and the object is totally different from that with a figure. He has also made some site-specific pieces which relate to but differ from the figures.